As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
As processors, graphics cards, random access memory (RAM) and other components in information handling systems have increased in clock speed and power consumption, the amount of heat produced by such components as a side-effect of normal operation has also increased. Often, the temperatures of these components need to be kept within a reasonable range to prevent overheating, instability, malfunction and damage leading to a shortened component lifespan. Accordingly, air movers (e.g., cooling fans and blowers) have often been used in information handling systems to cool information handling systems and their components.
One challenge in the industry is providing power and thermal budget support of third-party information handling resources in an information handling system. In many instances, power and thermal budget support is provided to a handful of “approved” or “verified” information handling resources in power and thermal budget tables stored in a management controller or other information handling resource. However, once a version of management controller firmware is released, additions to the power or thermal budget tables to add support for another information handling resource (e.g., a Peripheral Component Interconnect-Extended or “PCIe” card) may require reconfiguration or recompilation of management controller firmware, which may delay shipment or release of an information handling system having power and thermal support for the information handling resource. In addition, any unsupported “off-the-shelf” information handling resources added by a customer after delivery may be assigned default parameters with respect to power and thermal budgeting rather than having customized parameters, which may lead to suboptimal performance.
In addition, in existing approaches, if a solution requires a customer thermal table, it is often provided in the form of a personality module that is embedded within the management controller and every time the management controller boots, it looks for the personality module information and loads it into memory. However, if subsequent firmware updates are made to the management controller, new thermal features associated with the firmware update may not be used, as the personality module information may override such updates.